124 W RIGHT MORRIS'S "About Fic- tion" (Harper & Row) tackles this moot subject with the pawky, resistant prose of his own fic- tion: "Before they made tools, perhaps before they made trouble, men and women were busy at the loom of fiction looking for clues to becoming more hu- man." This sentence, from the first page, demands rereading; we are put off by the folksy "before they made trouble" and the confusion of meta- phors that has us looking for clues in a loom. The opening chapters have, as a whole, the air of a "big subject" essay assigned on an exam; the bright but fl ustered student fills his blue book with ingratiating archness: Fiction does play a role in ,vhat ,ve call education and ,veights the arms of girls at the turn of stairways) \vhere young men whose interests are Inore than literary come to their did -and aggressive mystification- Each time the writer creates and solves the problems of fiction) he makes it po<;;- sible for men and ,vomen to live in this world. The manner in which this fiction affirms the \vorld is a measure of its quality: the manner in which it rejects the world is a measure of its fantasy. However, as Mr. Morris begins to ex- amine specific authors, books, and sen- tences, in the kind of dry and loving -'" \:::::::::--.. Ii ' --=- ,,()fi "t""'" . , " " BOOKS Wright OJl lV ritin g light that illumines his photographs of Nebraska feed mIlls and bureau tops, the discussIon gathers confidence and becomes a personal but credibly specific analysis of just what happened to American literature The authors he quotes by way of illustration are a small, lean band: Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Richard Henry Dana, and some few others. Foreigners frequently cited are Joyce, Mann, Camus, Céline, Beckett. Wright Morris does not quote writers fond of Latinisms or complexly balanced sentences-no Melville, no Proust, one brief sentence by Henry James His most favored passages- the fi rst lines of Crane's "The Open Boat" and Camus's "The Stranger," a number of sentences from Stein's "Three Lives" -share a weathered, fondled bareness, a sun-bleached, bare- bones somethIng that blends with his own style and leads naturally into his basic discussion, which is of the ver- nacular voice in fiction. The vernacular-meaning, in the Latin, "born in one's house, native"- arose on the American frontier as "a language that departed in wondrous ways from the 'written' language of the popular noveL" Coincident with the emergence of self-consciously American writing, "photography pro- ENTER\Nq LLSV L SETTLEO IWCOt\ R"TEO eAAKRU'PT '1 t '101 ,Q1r I I 1 , , , ",.\ I , , OJk vided the writer with the assurance of an objective, irreducible reality he needed merely the talent, and the can- dor, to describe." The notion evolved that "an accurate rendering of what was 'real' fulfilled the possibilities of fiction." What was the instrument for rendering the real? The vernacular: " A .. h fi n1encan wnters were... t erst to intuit (through Stein's example) that the catchal] web of the vernacular reflected the mind at its conscious level. This new melodious tongue shaped the wnter to a greater extent than he shaped the language.... This con- fidence in the language had the effect of depressing the imagination." And to this day, Mr. Morris concludes, the American writer is stuck with a de- pressed imagination and a debilitating dependence upon facts, upon experi- ence. Hemingway "recouped his used- up resources by turning to wars, bull- fights, and safaris;" Mailer writes a "novel-as-history [that] must make room for Mailer, since it would not be much without him." Others, after Huck Finn, tell boys' stories: "The coinage of a language suitable to a boy is at the headwater of our literature." But not even an American writer can remain a boy forever; there is "a predictable tendency to peter out. This is so common we are highly impressed by the occasional exceptIon. Early achievement and premature recession may well be the linchpin in our cult of youth." The point, though often enough made, is stated by Mr. Morris with a heartfelt, even stricken eloquence: The books we love are about growIng up more than about being grown. By its very nature the vernacular is sympathetic to first love) first triumph) and first rejec- tions) but inclined to show ,veclr in the repeat performances. 1'hat he begins with a bang) often very large, then fades away to a repeti- tive whimper) can be traced to the ,vrit- er's conviction that personal experience) preferably rugged) is his primary source material. When this lode of ore is de- pleted) he hetS shot his bolt It is possible to postpone this crisis by pursuing life) as in a safari) bringing back for the stay-at-homes the loves and trophies of faraway places. But even this is at best a delaying tactic, based on the writer's virility and vigor. There is a place in it for the mature man-the big-game hunter with his female trophies-but there is no place for an old man ,vhose life, if not his work) is behind him. Rather surprisingly, Morris goes on to deplore, in stern sociological man- ner, the poor position of the elderly in American society, and to prescribe, for